“If you try to put 100% of your information into a piece of content, it's going to be too dense. It's going to be too complicated, and someone is only going to read 10% of it or 0% of it.
If you try to put 80% in, well, guess what, it's going to be more digestible now, and someone might read 70% of it or watch 70% of it. You can retarget them with something else down the line and you fill in that extra 30%.
Get them in the door, get them hooked on something, and then you can fill in the gaps later once you've sold them on your story.”
- Erik Schmidt
//
To listen to more The Life-Long Customer podcast episodes, follow us on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thelifelongcustomerpodcast/
Follow the host Brad Hammond https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-hammond
#thelifelongcustomerpodcast #customerjourney #marketingleadership #b2bmarketing
“If you try to put 100% of your information into a piece of content, it's going to be too dense. It's going to be too complicated, and someone is only going to read 10% of it or 0% of it.
If you try to put 80% in, well, guess what, it's going to be more digestible now, and someone might read 70% of it or watch 70% of it. You can retarget them with something else down the line and you fill in that extra 30%.
Get them in the door, get them hooked on something, and then you can fill in the gaps later once you've sold them on your story.”
- Erik Schmidt
//
To listen to more The Life-Long Customer podcast episodes, follow us on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thelifelongcustomerpodcast/
Follow the host Brad Hammond https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-hammond
#thelifelongcustomerpodcast #customerjourney #marketingleadership #b2bmarketing
Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.
Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The LifeLong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond.
Ice Artificio: 0:25
And I'm your co-host, Ice Artificio.
Brad Hammond: 0:27
Today, we have Erik Schmidt from Paradox, Content Marketing Manager. Erik, it's really nice to have you on.
Erik Schmidt: 0:34
Yes. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Ice Artificio: 0:36
Yes. Thanks for being here, Erik. So before we get started, we'd love to know more about you. Can you tell us more about you, what you do?
Erik Schmidt: 0:44
Yes. Yes, for sure. I can give you a quick origin story that led me to where I am now. I definitely took a little bit of a winding path to get into content marketing compared to some people. But at the same time, there's literally people on my own team that have a similar background. And I think a lot of content marketers probably started in a similar place.
So I was actually a journalism major. That was my focus initially. My first couple of jobs out of school were working for newspapers and magazines as a journalist, as a writer, and I got into that, because I loved writing and I love storytelling. So it felt like a pretty natural fit to go into something like that. But what I learned pretty quickly was it wasn't quite for me. It's a job that definitely feels pretty isolating and unfulfilling in a lot of ways.
You get your stories every week. You pour your soul into it, and then you release it out into the world, and people either read it or they don't read it, and then you get your next story that next week, and you're never really building towards anything bigger. It's always just one story at a time. So even though I loved the writing and storytelling, it just didn't seem like the right career path for me.
So what ended up happening is I fell into an opportunity to work for a start-up company in Austin. I'm from Chicago originally. And within a couple of weeks of getting that offer, I was packed up and moving down to Austin, where I live now. When I say it was a start-up company, it was a start-up company like literally at the time was being operated out of a house. I show up after packing up, moving halfway across the country, and there's no onboarding materials for me. There's no 30-, 60-, 90-day plan of what I'm supposed to do. I show up with my bags, and it was like, well, figure it out, like find something to do.
And they hired me, because they needed someone with my skill set. They just didn't have a plan for me. So the first few months I was there, it's a sports apparel company, and I stood in one place for 12 hours a day and packed T-shirts. So that was like my start at this company.
Slowly, but surely, I started to figure out how I could apply my skills. I took on social media. That was my first foray into doing more marketing, just doing social media marketing. That transitioned into email marketing, and then I took on bigger content pieces, decks, and different things like that and then bigger marketing campaigns. That transitioned into a few other roles I had in other companies.
I think what I learned is this was what I wanted to do, because it's the storytelling and the writing that I'm passionate about. But you actually get to build towards something bigger than yourself. You get to work with a team of people. You're working for a company, and you're growing. And I've worked at a lot of smaller start-up companies, Paradox is technically a start-up. It's a little bit bigger than these other companies, but this idea of building towards something bigger with content marketing is super exciting.
Ice Artificio: 3:45
Yes. Sounds like you've had a bit of an adventure. And can you tell us how you stumbled upon Paradox and exactly what you do for them now?
Erik Schmidt: 3:53
Sure. Yes. Yes, so I had a few roles in the past, various companies, sports T-shirt company, video game company, a company that was in the pet space. So I had a background more like B2C, CPG companies. Just kind of like started having relationships with different people through LinkedIn. Some people I kind of started chatting with, and we had similar interest, and it kind of became like a mentor relationship.
One of them is the CMO at Paradox, Josh. We call them JZ, which always confuses people who don't know that we call him that. His name is Josh Zywien. And people are like, wow, like Beyonce's husband works at your company? Like, no, no, no, it's the other guy.
So I had a great relationship with him, super smart guy, very similar interest, very similar approach to marketing. And he went over to Paradox a couple of years ago and was looking for a content guy and reached out to me. And I was at actually a different company in the same space that Paradox is in for a year. And then, after that year ended, it worked out well. I was able to transition over there, and things have been great. It's a great team.
As far as what Paradox does, so we're in the recruiting and hiring and talent space. The simplest way to explain what Paradox does is we're making hiring and recruiting modern and conversational and just simple. So if you think about what Siri and Alexa have done for just everyday life, taking on work and tasks that people don't have time for or just simply don't want to do anymore, that's what our product, which is a conversational assistant that we call Olivia, that's what she's doing for recruiting.
So I can give you just a super quick example. If you imagine that you're at your favorite restaurant, in your favorite store, and you see an ad that says text apply to this number. You text that short code and Olivia responds within seconds and says, "Hey, I would love to help you apply." So now all of a sudden, you're applying via text, via conversation, whereas the old way of doing, it was pretty miserable, right?
We've all had terrible experiences applying for jobs. I know that I have where it's long, it's tedious, it's cumbersome. It feels unnecessary. The platforms feel like their built 100 years ago. And then you actually applied, it takes two weeks for someone to get back to you. And it's just unfun and it's unnatural because we do everything on our phones now.
So with Olivia, you can literally apply by having a conversation on your phone. She screens you by asking questions via text. She can schedule you automatically. She can answer any questions, like tell me more about your company, or why should I apply for this marketing job? So long story short, she's making applications in the conversations and turning something that traditionally is very unfun into something that feels natural and seamless. So it's a pretty exciting product, and it's really exciting to make content for it. So I'm definitely happy where I am now.
Ice Artificio: 7:07
Okay. That sounds really good. So you guys are in the HR recruitment space.
Erik Schmidt: 7:13
Yeah.
Ice Artificio: 7:14
What does content look like in that space?
Erik Schmidt: 7:16
Right. It's funny because I just got talking about how the technology and the platforms that these companies use feel outdated and prehistoric and unfun and boring and clinical and all of the stuff. There are some companies who do it better than others, but generally, the content in our industry feels the same way. It feels outdated, right?
The design from our competitors feels 10 years old in a lot of ways, and it feels dry. It feels needlessly complex, and we're in a more complex space for sure. There's probably people listening who I just explain what we do, and they might be like, that's a little bit confusing. I've been in the space for 2 years, and I'm still figuring it out for sure. It's definitely a little bit complex, but just because the topic is complex, it doesn't mean that the content needs to be.
That's kind of where I'm slotting in. And as someone who's a little bit newer to the industry, I'm trying to bring that fresh perspective and that fresh approach of someone who doesn't understand that someone who's been in the industry for 10 years understands. So I think sometimes expertise on a topic can lead you to explaining that in a pretty poor way, because you know it so well, and you can't comprehend how someone else doesn't get it. So that's something I learned back to my journalism days of taking on subject matters that I didn't know anything about.
But guess what, within three days, I have to write a story, and I have to figure out how to tell the story in an interesting and compelling way that the average person is going to resonate with. So that's very much what I'm trying to do in this space as well is come in and tell interesting stories and simplify and make things easier to understand for our audience.
Brad Hammond: 9:10
I love that. So if we dive into some of that, one of the things we talked about is the power of simplifying your content. That's really something you emphasize. Tell us about what that means to you and how marketers out there can go about doing this.
Erik Schmidt: 9:27
Yes, for sure. Especially in our space or in spaces that are a little bit more complicated and require a lot of explanation, I think people fall into a trap of “this is complicated.” We need to be so thorough and comprehensive in how we explain this. We need to take everything and cram it into one two-minute video. We have to take everything and cram it into a five-page PDF content piece. And what ends up happening is now it's so dense with information, because you had to cram everything in there.
Nobody wants to watch it, and nobody wants to read it. I know I don't, and I'm a writer. I understand that people typically don't want to read. If you open up a document and it has tiny little font and just paragraphs and paragraphs of copy on one page, people's eyes glaze over and they go, "I don't want to read this."
They're going to move on to the next piece of content that explains it better and quicker and simpler. I think people struggle with that. I think people struggle with knowing what to take out and what to put in and how to balance being informative but also being like digestible and readable and snackable. That’s how people consume things now.
So when I approach the content that we make at Paradox, the videos that we're creating, blogs that we're writing content, pieces that we're building, it's always from that lens of, how do we take something complicated and distill it down to its purest form, so someone who only has 10 minutes to read something can scan it or watch it in one minute and walk away feeling like wow, I understood what they're trying to tell me.
So there's like some specific projects that we could for sure dive into. But generally, that's my approach. I actually think my experience working in print media and magazines and dealing with the layouts of pages in a very like magazine-style, I also try to pull that approach into what we're building visually. How do you make the hierarchy of the page flow in a way where your eyes nowhere to go? I see so many people lay out pages where everything is teeny tiny fonts and tons of charts everywhere, and I'm like, "I don't know where my eye should go first." It's about distilling things down, simplifying, putting just a couple of things on the page.
Because here's the thing, if you try to put 100% of your information into a piece of content, it's going to be too dense. It's going to be too complicated and someone is only going to read 10% of it or 0% of it. If you try to put 80% in, well, guess what, it's going to be more digestible now and someone might read 70% of it or watch 70% of it. And then you can retarget them with something else down the line and you fill in that extra 30%. So that's definitely my approach when it comes to the stuff. Get them in the door, get them hooked on something, and then you can fill in the gaps later once you've sold them on your story.
Brad Hammond: 12:31
I love that. You mentioned a couple example projects you've done. Let's walk through. Let's walk through, so I'd love for the audience to hear about how this looks like in real practice and all that.
Erik Schmidt: 12:44
Totally. So a big piece of content that we just put out, actually a couple of weeks ago, was a two-minute video, a product video that told the story of what Olivia, what our product does in the landscape of hourly hiring, how Olivia can impact hourly hiring. And I told the story from the perspective of both the hiring side, the employer, the hiring manager, and the candidate. And the concept that we came up with was we used a coffee shop.
So this went through lots of iterations. There's obviously lots of discussions with our team, with the video team that we work with, what's the best approach here. And inevitably, what happens when you have a lot of smart people working on a project, it becomes what I just described, right, we need to have this. We need to show this. This needs to be there. We're missing this product feature, make sure that's in there.
And all of a sudden, something that was supposed to be a simple two-minute video became very bloated feeling and the first cut of this video was eight minutes long, and there was no emotional resonance. And after two minutes, you're like, I don't want to watch this anymore. And I guess, to take a step back, so what this video was, it was a pretty ambitious project, one of the more ambitious ones of my career. We hired actors. We shot for three days at multiple locations, so it was a pretty big undertaking.
We hired a video team. That was 15 people from the video team on-site, lighting and costuming, and all of this stuff. And we get the first cut back, like I said, and it's eight minutes long, and the emotional resonance that we wanted to have of telling this very human story, how does our technology bring these two people together, we really wanted to show the product off. But we really wanted to show that human story and how our product can make two people's lives better and easier. It just wasn't there. It was just bloated and boring and, honestly, there was some concern of like, oh, man, did we just waste a bunch of money on this video that's going to suck?
So we went back to the drawing board into that word of simplicity. How do we get this from eight minutes to two minutes? How do we simplify it? What can we take out and still tell the story effectively? We got it down to two minutes. We pulled stuff out, things that were like this has to be in here. I went back and I'm like, we have to take this out. It's ruining the momentum of the story. It's cluttering it up. It's making it ineffective. And finally, I was like, okay, let's take it out. Then we cut and we cut this out. We cut that out. All these things that we thought we had to have, well, guess what, we didn't need to have it, right? Because what we really needed was a few key components of the product, and we needed to tell an emotional impactful story that would resonate with people. And I think we ended up doing that.
And do we show every feature? No. Will people have questions that they can follow up with our sales team or whoever? Yes, they will. That's the point, right? We wanted to tell a good enough story to get people interested. And we did that, and it's so simple. There's no talking, right? This is something that many people have been like, wow, I didn't even realize no one said anything. There's no talking. The story takes place visually. We tell the whole story visually. I don't even think you've realized there's no talking or no audio or anything like that.
We simplified it. We let the story happen on the screen. We only included what we really needed to include. And then we'll get people excited and then we can follow up with other content down the road. Honestly, my inspiration for the approach, I'm sure you guys have seen the movie Up.
Brad Hammond: 16:25
Yes.
Erik Schmidt: 16:26
That opening sequence where it's the two, the husband and the wife, and there's no talking, right? It goes through their whole lives, this whole journey with just music, and you're watching the story unfold. And that might seem like a weird inspiration or a weird reference point, but how magical and emotional is that little five-minute story from a Pixar movie? I cried just thinking about it. That's what I wanted to try to do for our product is how do we tell our story in two minutes with no talking and make it visual. I hope people like it, and I hope we pulled it off. I think we did.
Brad Hammond: 17:03
I love that example. It sounds awesome, Erik. I'm going to go immediately watch that after this podcast.
Ice Artificio: 17:10
Yeah. I don't want to go back to that movie, because that gave me a real heartbreak.
Erik Schmidt: 17:15
It's tough. Yes. I mean great movie, but yeah, isn't that wild though? I think everyone feels that way about that sequence. I mean, who has watched that and hasn't cried? And it's a five-minute cartoon with no talking. So pretty awesome.
Brad Hammond: 17:32
So for marketers out there listening, maybe they want to simplify their own content, get started on this journey. What are some key pieces of advice you'd give them when it comes to simplifying content and getting started with this?
Erik Schmidt: 17:46
Yes. I think I've touched on some of the stuff already. But first of all, I think what people sometimes lose out on is they don't put themselves in the audience's shoes, which is weird, because we're all consumers, and we all have our favorite brands, and we're inspired by those brands. And yet when it comes to making our own stuff, we almost get tunnel vision and we lose sight of that. So I would say, first of all, be inspired by your favorite brands. I know I am. I'm taking cues from Pixar movies and other things that interest me.
I'm a huge movie, TV, music person, so I'm constantly inspired by everything around me. I try to tie that stuff into what I'm doing. Put yourself in the audience's shoes. Would you want to read a content piece that has teeny-tiny 8.5 that's all cluttered together and smashed together? Or would you go this is boring, or this is too much information. I'm clicking off. I'm going somewhere else, because people seem to forget that stuff.
Think about what you would be interested in, right? And it seems like a really obvious advice, but I honestly have to remind myself that all the time. I write something, I create something, and then I look at it and I go, these things, I wouldn't want to read this. I got to go back to the drawing board and fix list. Distill things down in a way that feels simple. I go back to that word, I remind myself of that word every single day working for Paradox.
Is this simple? Is someone going to be able to understand this in five seconds? Or do they have to rack their brain to try to read it or try to understand it? So go through that exercise. What's the most important stuff? What's the story we're trying to convey? What can we cut out and use for our next content piece that we'll use as a follow up once we get somebody interested? Again, like take cues from your favorite magazines, from your favorite brands, having the best content marketing in the recruitment and talent space for me and for my company, that's not good enough. We want to be the best content marketers ever, right? Like that should be your goal.
It shouldn't be like, oh, well, this looks fine for our industry. Be inspired by the best. Be inspired by Apple, by Nike. What are they doing? Tie in those elements. I try to tie in elements from my favorite brands and magazines and making things just look as good as they possibly can. So I think just being inspired, honestly, to be a little bit corny is something that any good content marketer should be.
Don't operate inside of a vacuum. Be inspired by the world. It kind of is crazy to say, but everything's kind of been done before. Everything's sort of been written. Everything has been approached in almost all the ways it can be, and that's fine. Take what's out there, and what's great and then make it your own, right? With that video that I mentioned, I literally was inspired by the movie Up. And I said, how can we take the story that's resonated with so many people? And how can I turn that into something for Paradox and make it a piece of Paradox content?
So honestly, that would probably be the biggest piece of advice I can give is just read things, watch things, listen to things, be inspired by the world around you and then go, how can I take this thing that's amazing, this great piece of content created by an artistic genius, and how can I apply it to what I'm doing as a marketer?
Brad Hammond: 21:22
That's amazing.
Ice Artificio: 21:23
Insightful.
Brad Hammond: 21:24
Well, thanks so much, Erik. This has been amazing to have you on, and have you share all your wisdom and insights and advice here. Really appreciated.
Ice Artificio: 21:31
Yes. Thanks, Erik.
Erik Schmidt: 21:33
Yes. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.